This week, the video game industry has gotten a new boomer energy infusion with the announcement of a new one Indiana Jones game. In the meantime, there are some too a James Bond play in worksand Ubisoft announced that he works in an open world Star Wars game—The first of a possible flood of new games taking place in the galaxy far away, once EA’s exclusive deal with Lucasfilm ends in 2023. Either way, it feels like a disastrous sign of creative surrender a few months into the next console cycle.
While Hollywood is in a hurry to buy the rights to video game movies, now the gaming industry seems poised to lean more and more into established Hollywood box office franchises. These are not the market synergies I was looking for. Both media (and their respective corporate lords) have a lot to learn and contribute to each other, but spending years and hundreds of millions changing the same old stories (mostly white). Hollywood is already filled with eating its own tail creating endless sequels and rebootsIndependence Day: resurgence, Jurassic world, ghost hunters. SCrossing it in games is even more exhausting.
“Some big studios are making licensed games,” said Geoff Keighley, host of the Game Awards wrote yesterday on Twitter. “What is your dream studio / franchise collaboration that you hope to see someday?”
Fantasy your favorite developer by creating a game in your favorite genre from your favorite piece of fiction, as if Square Enix were making an open world RPG based on Frank Herbert’s Dune, it is nothing new. Increasingly, these fantasies are becoming a reality as the cost of getting big budget games out of advertising.to look for safer bets. The success of Dark knight films led to the Arkham trilogy, followed more recently by Insomniac’s Spiderman. Spider-Man i thousands Morales and even Crystal Dynamics’ The Marvel Avengers: the popular studio behind the Tomb Raider restart work based on everyone’s favorite Marvel characters.
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This is not bad nor is it a guaranteed success, as evidenced by Square Enix’s disappointment with Avengers. Some fantastic games have come out of this presentation process, but it can also be a recipe for the imagination of death. Hitman Manufacturer IO Interactive is moving from its sole Agent 47 to the James Bond License. Wolfenstein Developer Machine Games will revive Nazi puncher and colonialist Indiana Jones. Meanwhile, it’s been decades since these stories felt fresh and creatively relevant.
Disney removes the legacy of Lucasfilm video games from the Sarlacc pit with Lucasfilm Games, a sign that the mega media corporation probably intends to flood the market with recently licensed games just as it does movies and TV shows. All this, of course, is based on the existing canon and everything is owned by a company that has a net worth higher than the GDP of most countries.
EA had a lot of shit for their ten-year deal to be the sole publisher of Star Wars games just to launch, by 2019, a total of three. Now it seems that the wish of the monkey’s leg has been fulfilled and we are about to achieve much more.
“We want to work with the best teams in its class that can make great games across our IP,” Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly announced yesterday. Reilly, in particular, said he expects games “across a wide range of platforms, genres and experiences,” with many “professionals” at Lucasfilm Games to help ensure developers set up the creative vision for the adaptations. In other words, an open world Ubisoft game is just the beginning. By way of comparison, during last December’s investor call Disney announced nearly a dozen new Star Wars movies and TV shows
And, of course, there is everything Star Wars EA games keep working. An EA spokesman said Kotaku yesterday that the terms of its exclusivity agreement with Lucasfilm have not changed and remain in force until 2023. According to a source with knowledge of the agreement, only EA can publish Star Wars games before 2023, when the collaboration with Lucasfilm will continue, but will cease to be exclusive. That means Ubisoft Star Wars the game will not come out until at least the end of 2023.
SSome of these games can be fantastic. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019 and 2020 Star Wars: Squadrons they were a lot of fun, but I don’t know we need a dozen more budget games attempts to play in this space. I would love to see Respawn or EA Motive do something original, Ubisoft too. Despite the name that causes the eyes, Fenyx: Immortals Rising it was pretty cool, even if it also dropped a lot in previous Ubisoft and Nintendo games Breath of the Wild.
It’s easy to imagine how studios can combine game genres and mechanics with already established and beloved fictional worlds. It is much more difficult to conceptualize all the ideas and projects that will not see the light of day due to this media consolidation.
“None,” former Naughty Dog developer and director of The Last of Us Bruce Straley he wrote with a friendly wink in response to Keighley’s mental experiment. “We need all this talent and money focused on creating new content, new IP addresses and innovating in the AAA Geoff space.”
Publishing box office games has never been a bastion of risk-taking and creativity, but it could be even more stagnant if it is further monopolized with the existing entertainment monoculture. So no, I wouldn’t want to see BioWare create another one Star Wars RPG, and I’m far from delighted with the possibility of Machine Games trying knots trying to rehabilitate Indiana Jones, a tomb attacker, to make it something less culturally unpleasant. It would be great, as always, to watch video games try to do something new. After all, where more will be future Hollywood blockbusters I come from?